Literary prize winners you don't want to miss
The first half of the year has seen many literary accolades, both local and international, awarded to outstanding authors. Here's a selection (there are too many to mention them all!) which includes a couple of prizes you might have missed, as well as the more celebrated. We think they all deserve another round of applause before we rush headlong into the second half of the year.
2024 Age Book of the Year for Fiction
🏆 Women & Children by Tony Birch
A powerful, personal novel about women and justice, from one of this country's most loved and clear-eyed storytellers.
Read our review here.
2024 Age Book of the Year for Nonfiction
🏆 Life So Full of Promise by Ross McMullin
Acclaimed historian and biographer Ross McMullin has again combined prodigious research and narrative flair in this sequel to Farewell, Dear People.
Life So Full of Promise, his second multi-biography about Australia's lost generation of World War I, features a collection of interwoven stories from that defining era.
2023 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel
🏆 The Will of the Many by James Islington
At the elite Catenan Academy, a young fugitive uncovers layered mysteries and world-changing secrets, in this new fantasy series by James Islington, the internationally bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy.
2024 The Australian/Vogel's Award for Young Writers
🏆 First Year by Kristina Ross
First Year is a deeply intelligent and insightful exploration of creativity and performance, marking the entry of an audacious new literary talent
2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction & 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction
🏆 Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
A searing, gripping novel about a young Tamil woman living through the Sri Lankan civil war.
2024 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
🏆 The Sitter by Angela O'Keefe
A highly original work narrated by Hortense, the wife of Paul Cezanne, who is watching a novelist write a book about her life. Heartbreaking and perfectly formed The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.
Read our review here.
2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel
🏆 Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke
A novel set in Civil War-era Louisiana, as the South transforms and a brilliant cast of characters – enslaved and free women, plantation gentry, battle-weary Confederate and Union soldiers – are caught in the maelstrom.
2024 Indie Book Award for Book of the Year
🏆 Killing for Country: A Family Story by David Marr
David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result. This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world, a war still unresolved in today's Australia.
Read our review here.
2024 Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction
🏆 The Visitors by Jane Harrison
The most exciting debut in 2023, The Visitors is an audacious, earthy, funny, gritty and powerful re-imagining of a crucial moment in Australia's history – an unputdownable work of fiction.
Read our review here.
2024 International Booker Prize
🏆 Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
From an internationally acclaimed, multi award-winning author: this is a story of love and betrayal set in Berlin during the years before and after the fall of the Wall.
Read our review here.
2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
🏆 Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
A mesmerising story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in a mental asylum, in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.
2024 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
🏆 A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
A gripping, intimate story of one heartbreaking day in Palestine that reveals lives, loves, enmities, and histories in violent collision.
2024 Stella Prize
🏆 Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned.
2024 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize
🏆 Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from Caleb Azumah Nelson, the no.1 bestselling, award-winning author of Open Water.
The Victorian Prize for Literature 2024 & The Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry 2024
🏆Chinese Fish by Grace Yee
Chinese Fish is a family saga that spans the 1960s through to the 1980s. Narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a 'yellow peril' menace and an exotic 'model minority'.
The Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction 2024
🏆 Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko
Two extraordinary Indigenous stories set five generations apart. In this brilliant epic, Melissa Lucashenko torches Queensland's colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future.
Read our review here.
The Victorian Premier's Literary Award People's Choice Award 2024
🏆 The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein
Bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialisation and brutal deployment globally of Israel's occupation-enforcing technologies.
2024 Women's Prize for Nonfiction (inaugural year)
🏆 Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
A wild ride into the uncanny mirror world of our polarised culture, from the international bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine.
Keep an eye on our blog for the latest literary news and prize annoucements.
